The Department for Mental Health/Mental Retardation Services is applying to the National Institute of Mental Health for funds to demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness, generalizability and relative cost of individualized, proactive crisis planning and the provision of consumer support crisis services within the context of existing patterns of crisis response services. The Department has designated persons with a severe mental illness as a priority. Persons within that population who have been crisis free for 60 days will be the subject population of this demonstration project. Three regional community mental health centers have been selected as demonstration sites. At each site, clients will be randomly assigned to receive crisis planning and existing crisis services or to receive consumer support crisis services, crisis plann- ing, and existing crisis services. Each of the sites will have a group of consumer volunteers trained to provide peer support and crisis intervention. The major hypotheses to be tested in the project are that (A) Crisis plan services and crisis plan services with consumer involvement will both be associated with superior outcomes for these severely mentally ill clients as measured by clinical status, community functioning, family functioning, vocational status, quality of life, and mental health services utilization in comparison to severely mentally ill clients not receiving such services; (B) Crisis plan services with consumer involvement will achieve superior outcomes to crisis plan services alone; and (C) Crisis plan services with consumer involvement will be more cost effective than crisis plan services alone with costs measured on a contact unit basis per client across all contacts and all clients. An experimental design coupled with two quasi-experimental groups will be used to evaluate the project. Three non-demonstration sites will be selected to collect comparison data. Process and outcome evaluations will be used to study the implementation and the effects of the demonstration. Outcome questions will be concerned with the comparative effects and cost-effectiveness of the experimental and control interventions as measured on a battery of outcome indicators.